I love traditions. I love the fact that everyone is doing the same thing and having fun together. Quite a lot of the time, the meaning is lost or forgotten or – mainly for children – unknown.
Kids just know that sometime in February they get pancakes, in March/April they get chocolate eggs, in October they dress up scary, in November there are fireworks and in December they get presents. I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing. I’m quite happy for traditions to continue as long as they are fun and don’t hurt people.
The other day, though, as I was going “ooh” and “aah” I was thinking about Guy Fawkes and Russell Brand. I imagine everyone watching fireworks that night must have made the same connection but for anyone who missed it, this was my line of thought.
Guy Fawkes was a dissident. He was part of a group with a specific goal, definite plans and very well co-ordinated. He wanted to overthrow the ruling power (King James) and replace them with another (Princess Elizabeth).
Russell Brand is a dissident. He is part of no group, has no specific goal, no definite plans and is not co-ordinated in any way.
I feel that in telling people not to vote, Brand is actually a danger to society. The people that Brand is telling not to vote are more likely to be the middle ground voters – and by that I mean the non-extremists. The extremes are the ones who are almost guaranteed to turn out and vote regardless of anything else. The Ukips and the BNPs, the Greens and the Socialists.
By encouraging people to not vote, the number of votes required for one of these parties to get in is therefore reduced and we have seen numbers of these gain seats over the recent years.
Brand’s solution may actually condemn us Nazi-ism and we don’t have an Indiana Jones around to save us this time. Thanks, Russell.
What he should be doing, is encouraging people to vote for the least bad option whilst he figures out his grand plans for an alternative system. However, I doubt that any system will be forthcoming, at least in my life time. Other systems have been tried in the past 100 years – communism, dictatorships – but have been fought down by the good old Western democracies.
Brand’s solution is to make the ruling power work for the people better and provide a more egalitarian system. Democracy is currently the best solution for this. The only logical way to take this further that I have been able to think of since watching his interview with Paxman is to have all decisions made by all of the people.
Give everyone little yes/no/abstain buzzers in their homes, linked up to the TV set and pop up exciting questions such as Should abortion be legal?, Should we invade Syria? and Should we stop all of the foreigns coming in? and I’m sure you’ll get lots of interaction and popular consensus. Good luck getting decisions made about sewers or tax though.
Me, I prefer to leave the power in the hands of the people who spend their whole working lives thinking about these problems and working towards solutions together. Sure, some of them might be complete idiots, whack jobs or repulsive people. That’s why there’s 600-odd of them, to try and have a consensus between the people we elect to represent us.
Whilst I have a lot of faith in my fellow citizens, I’m sure not all of them are educated enough on Israel/Palestine, the NHS and the school system among other things to be able to make important informed choices. Leave it up to the people who train to do this, even if they are complete douches.
We need to learn from our history. Our government is the result of years of trial and error at different systems and this is the one that the majority believe works best. When you think about it, compared to other situations in the world right now (Zimbabwe, North Korea) and those in the past (Nazis, McCarthyism) the current system isn’t too bad really.
Notes:
1. I would vote Green if they fielded a candidate in my area. I am aware that the word extreme might seem odd in this context but they are one of the more left-field parties.
2. Robert Webb wrote a much better response to Brand which is here but I have been needing to get this out for a while.
3. I was going to do an amazing Photoshop of Brand wearing a Guy Fawkes mask but a) I left it too late and have to go to work, b) I don’t have Photoshop, c) I’m not good at Photoshop and d) the internet has a picture of him wearing one from the Million Mask March.